Public TV execs and viewers respond to an anti-PBS op-ed that ran in several newspapers: the Salem Statesman Journal, the St. Petersburg Times and the Minneapolis Star Tribune (registration required).

The secret operations of a New York City agency obscure the likely sale of city TV and radio stations WNYE, reports the New York Times.

Talking with mediabistro.com, Washington Post magazine critic Peter Carlson reveals a perk of his job is getting the New Yorker delivered to his door. “I thought I was really hot shit until early one Sunday morning he delivered the wrong copy to me, and it was addressed to Noah Adams of NPR,” Carlson says. “I mean, Noah Adams is a fine human being, but we’re not talking about Henry Kissinger here.” (Via Romenesko.)

The Associated Press profiles Transom.org.

Executives at Denver’s two public TV stations “can’t agree whether it’s a blessing or a curse that the city has two PBS channels with different programs and audiences,” reports the Denver Business Journal.

The Public Broadcasting Button Collection collects promotional buttons from public radio and TV over the years. Sample: “1980. The year NPR stops being a secret. (don’t tell anybody)”

Richard Pearce discusses his film “The Road to Memphis,” an installment in PBS’s The Blues, on the Washington Post‘s website.

Twenty-three more public TV organizations received digital conversion funding in the year’s second round of Public Telecommunications Facilities Program grants. Aid went to state networks in 10 states, Connecticut, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont and West Virginia, as well as to 13 stations in other states.

Gerald Boyd, the former New York Times editor who stepped down after the Jayson Blair flap, is talking with NPR’s Tavis Smiley about becoming executive producer of Smiley’s show, reports the New York Post‘s gossip column. (Via Romenesko.)

Noncommercial radio broadcasters can apply to the FCC to reserve certain vacant FM allotments. The deadline is Nov. 21. (PDF.)

As the number of TV channels grows, the number that the average household watches grows much more slowly, illustrating the squeeze on audience size. It’s now 15 out of 102. In terms of percentage, that’s a new low of 15 percent, reports MediaPost. (Thanks to Benton Foundation for the link.)

KCET, Los Angeles, has backed out of a joint bid for the license of KOCE in Orange County, the Los Angeles Times reported. The public TV station’s licensee, Coast Community College District, is expected to choose a buyer Oct. 15. This leaves KOCE’s nonprofit fundraising arm competing against higher bids from three religious broadcasters.

“It wasn’t until I was 28 that I could write confidently,” says Ira Glass in ReadyMade. “I had been living with a woman for seven years who thought I was a moron. The day after she moved out, I wrote my first good story.”

Kentucky’s Georgetown College is going to sell WRVG, its public radio station. Since this article was published, Current has learned that a group of station members has expressed interest in buying the station.

A retired physics professor and former Republican state legislator wants license holders to clamp down on a lefty bias that he discerns in programs broadcast by Montana PBS, according to AP.